Report questions official Haiti quake death toll

TRENTON DANIEL

Asso­ci­ated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Far fewer peo­ple died or were left home­less by last year’s dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake than claimed by Hait­ian lead­ers, a report com­mis­sioned by the U.S. gov­ern­ment has con­cluded — chal­leng­ing a cen­tral premise behind a multibillion-dollar aid and recon­struc­tion effort.

The report, a copy of which was obtained Mon­day by The Asso­ci­ated Press, esti­mates that the death toll was between 46,000 and 85,000, far below the Hait­ian government’s offi­cial fig­ure of 316,000. The report was pre­pared for the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment but has not yet been pub­licly released.

Hait­ian author­i­ties stood by the fig­ures they released last year.

The report has incon­sis­ten­cies, how­ever, and won’t be released pub­licly until they are resolved, U.S. State Depart­ment spokes­woman Preeti Shah told the AP.

“The first draft of the report con­tained inter­nal incon­sis­ten­cies with its own find­ings,” Shah said in a tele­phone inter­view from Wash­ing­ton. “We are review­ing these incon­sis­ten­cies … to ensure infor­ma­tion we release is accurate.”

Shah would not elab­o­rate or say whether the report could change sig­nif­i­cantly once the incon­sis­ten­cies are resolved.

Hait­ian gov­ern­ment offi­cials said they had not seen the report and could not dis­cuss it.

Based on a sta­tis­ti­cal sam­pling from a hard-hit sec­tion of down­town Port-au-Prince, the report also esti­mates that about 895,000 peo­ple moved into tem­po­rary set­tle­ment camps around the cap­i­tal after the quake and that no more than 375,000 of those are still liv­ing under tarps and in tents and wooden shanties.

Those fig­ures con­flict with num­bers pro­vided by the U.N. Inter­na­tional Orga­ni­za­tion for Migra­tion, which says the camp pop­u­la­tion reached 1.5 mil­lion after the quake and that there are still 680,000 in set­tle­ment camps around the capital.

The report also says there was less rub­ble than pre­vi­ously esti­mated. Imme­di­ately after the earth­quake, the U.S. Army Corps of Engi­neers reported about 20 mil­lion cubic meters (26 mil­lion cubic yards) of debris, enough to fill the Louisiana Super­dome five times. But the study con­cluded that the total is less than half that amount.

The dis­crep­an­cies are more than aca­d­e­mic: The huge death toll and wide­spread destruc­tion helped jus­tify an inter­na­tional out­pour­ing of aid for the impov­er­ished Caribbean coun­try, includ­ing $5.5 bil­lion pledged dur­ing a March 2010 U.N. donor’s conference.

Many peo­ple ques­tioned the Hait­ian government’s death toll in the days after the quake. The offi­cials released pre­cise fig­ures even as thou­sands of bod­ies were scooped up and dumped in mass graves in what seemed a hap­haz­ard fash­ion. Many more were left to decay in col­lapsed build­ings. The gov­ern­ment never pub­licly revealed its method­ol­ogy for arriv­ing at its statistics.

USAID com­mis­sioned the report through a Wash­ing­ton con­sult­ing firm, LTL Strate­gies, to get a more accu­rate pic­ture of the amount of rub­ble to be cleared and hous­ing that needed to be built or repaired.

The report’s lead author, Tim­o­thy T. Schwartz, is an anthro­pol­o­gist whose pre­vi­ous work includes a book highly crit­i­cal of the efforts of major inter­na­tional aid groups in Haiti. He declined com­ment Mon­day on the USAID report but said in a blog post that no one should be sur­prised about a revised death toll given the pre­vi­ous con­flict­ing num­bers and lack of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the offi­cial figures.

“Intel­lec­tu­ally, I really don’t care how many peo­ple got killed in the earth­quake,” Schwartz wrote. “The draft report for USAID was sim­ply a job I was per­form­ing with a team of some 20 uni­ver­sity edu­cated pro­fes­sion­als, includ­ing two other PhDs. But per­son­ally, for me, in terms of the tragedy, less is bet­ter. And at about 60,000 dead, that’s still a huge tragedy.”

The research for the report was con­ducted in Jan­u­ary. Teams inter­viewed peo­ple face-to– face in almost 5,200 homes in densely pop­u­lated neigh­bor­hoods in down­town Port-au-Prince, ask­ing more than 100 ques­tions, includ­ing how many peo­ple died in each build­ing and where the sur­vivors went.

“Undoubt­edly, they have a pow­er­ful method­ol­ogy,” said Leonard Doyle, a spokesman for the U.N. migra­tion orga­ni­za­tion that con­ducted its own cen­sus of set­tle­ment camp pop­u­la­tions. “But we are 100 per­cent con­fi­dent that the peo­ple we counted are liv­ing in the camps.”

The report has been cir­cu­lat­ing in Haiti for the past sev­eral days.

The AP sent a copy to the office of Jean-Max Bel­lerive, who was prime min­is­ter dur­ing the earth­quake. His adviser, Alice Blanchet, ques­tioned the study’s method­ol­ogy and stuck to the fig­ures offi­cials released last year.

“Such extrap­o­la­tion … is hardly con­clu­sive,” Blanchet said. “The num­ber of the dead is likely to be much closer to the offi­cial num­bers pro­vided at a time of cat­a­stro­phe than the num­bers sug­gested in the lim­ited report.”

The admin­is­tra­tion of newly elected Pres­i­dent Michel Martelly will assume respon­si­bil­ity for recon­struc­tion efforts. His spokes­peo­ple did not respond to emails Mon­day seek­ing comment.

Posted by AP News on May 30 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.